This Hubble Space Telescope image represents the largest, most comprehensive history book of galaxies in the universe. (Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach/NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth and D.)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, just imagine the tome needing to be written to encapsulate a shot of 265,000 galaxies.

An extraordinary image snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope of the thousands of galaxies is actually a composite of 7,500 exposures, allowing for greater breadth of scope, reported Phys.org.

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The portrait of the universe encompasses a staggering 13.3 billion years — about 500 million years after the Big Bang.

Called the Hubble Legacy Field, the project also combines observations taken by several Hubble deep-field surveys, including the eXtreme Deep Field.

“Now that we have gone wider than in previous surveys, we are harvesting many more distant galaxies in the largest such data set ever produced by Hubble,” explained University of California Santa Cruz astronomer emeritus Garth Illingworth. “This one image contains the full history of the growth of galaxies in the universe, from their time as infants to when they grew into fully fledged adults.”

Even more fantastic is that the farthest galaxies are just one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can pick up. The wavelength range stretches from ultraviolet to near-infrared light.

Astronomers can trace the universe’s expansion through galaxies, which offer hints to the primal physics of the stars. It can also illustrate how elements originated, which created the conditions that allowed the creation of life on Earth.

“Such exquisite high-resolution measurements of the numerous galaxies in this catalog enable a wide swath of extragalactic study,” said lead researcher and University of Connecticut physics professor Katherine Whitaker. “Often, these kinds of surveys have yielded unanticipated discoveries which have had the greatest impact on our understanding of galaxy evolution.”

This wide-view shot contains roughly 30 times more galaxies than the previously most expansive image.